FOUR
GAVESTON’S MURDER TORE the country in two. Even those who had been most opposed to the man were horrified. The three earls had killed the king’s dearest friend. Bloody retribution seemed inevitable. Those responsible stood to lose their lands, their titles and their lives.
The Earl of Lancaster made no attempt to shift the blame from himself. From the moment Gaveston had arrived back in England Lancaster had hounded the king and his brother-in-arms. Gaveston had joined the king at York in February, where they remained until Margaret de Clare, Gaveston’s wife and Edward’s niece, gave birth to a daughter, Joan. In March, with the baronage and earls convinced now that war was certain, Thomas of Lancaster had openly assumed the leadership of the opposition to Gaveston, and gave the Earls of Pembroke and Surrey the task of leading an army to capture him. Gaveston knew the risk he was taking by remaining in the country, not least because he had been excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury on his return. But he decided nevertheless to stay in England. He chose to remain with Edward despite all the dangers. Edward, joyful that his beloved would not leave him, joined him at Newcastle at the end of March.
Edward and Gaveston may have thought that the opposition they would face would be unorganised, slow to muster and reluctant to start a civil war. Despite many harsh words, no one had yet actually taken up arms against them. But this time things were different. The Earl of Lancaster – the man whom Gaveston had mocked with the title of ‘the Fiddler’ – now used his authority to gather his own feudal army. He marched north, hiding his army by day and moving by night in order to escape notice. On 4 May he approached Newcastle. Edward and Gaveston were taken wholly by surprise and had to flee suddenly by ship to Scarborough Castle. In so doing they left everything behind: jewels, money, horses, soldiers and arms. Lancaster took the lot.
For the time being Edward and Gaveston were safe. But then Edward made a fatal mistake: he left Gaveston in Scarborough Castle while he went south to raise an army. The Earl of Lancaster quickly moved to place his forces between the king and the favourite, thereby separating Gaveston from all hope of aid. On 19 May, Gaveston, fearing the Earl of Lancaster would kill him, agreed to submit to Henry Percy and the Earls of Pembroke and Surrey. The Earl of Pembroke took responsibility for escorting Gaveston back to London. But at Deddington in Oxfordshire, Gaveston was kidnapped by the Earl of Warwick and taken to Warwick Castle. For the next nine days he was held there until the Earl of Lancaster arrived. Lancaster’s advice as to what to do next was the cold-hearted sentence Gaveston so feared: ‘While he lives there will be no safe place in the realm of England.’1 On 19 June Gaveston was taken to Blacklow Hill, land belonging to the Earl of Lancaster, and two Welshmen killed him. One ran him through the body with a sword, then the other hacked off his head as he lay dying on the grass.
The country went into shock. Every lord and knight throughout the realm readied for war. The Earl of Pembroke was beside himself, having sworn an oath to protect Gaveston’s life on penalty of forfeiting his lands and titles. In the days between Gaveston’s capture and murder Pembroke desperately tried to raise an army to free him, even appealing to the University of Oxford, who, besides not being known for their military strength, were not remotely concerned with Gaveston’s wellbeing or the earl’s plight. The country was not prepared to fight to save Gaveston, who had done nothing to make himself popular with the common people.
Edward’s own reaction to the murder was utter rage, which very quickly became cold fury.2 On hearing of Gaveston’s death he remarked, ‘By God’s soul, he acted as a fool. If he had taken my advice he never would have fallen into the hands of the earls. This is what I always told him not to do. For I guessed that what has now happened would occur.’3 But his remonstrance of his dead friend masked a depth of grief which would never leave him, and which was compounded by his sense of betrayal at the hands of his cousin, Lancaster, who was now far beyond forgiveness. His mind became focused on the destruction of the earls who had acted against him, and, given strength through grief, he thought and acted more clearly. With Gaveston dead, there was nothing more for the vast majority of the rebels to gain from opposing him. He stopped the earls marching on London by forewarning the city, shutting the gates against all comers, and defending its hinterland. The rebel earls, unable to seize the initiative, lingered at Ware, in Hertfordshire, their position growing weaker by the day. Edward meanwhile received help from all quarters. The Pope sent an embassy, as did the King of France, and lords and bishops came to his assistance to give him counsel and, if necessary, force of arms.
We do not know exactly when Roger returned from Ireland, and it could have been as late as January 1313; but there is every reason to suppose that he was brought back by news of Gaveston’s death. Not only was he a loyal lord, he was also experienced in battle. If the king himself did not summon him back, no doubt his kinsman, the Earl of Pembroke, did. By mid-July Lord Pembroke was advising the king to declare war on the rebel earls, a policy which necessitated the return from Ireland of as many loyal men as were available. Also, since the Earl of Lancaster had set himself against Lord Mortimer of Chirk, Roger and his uncle needed to be in England to defend their estates from the armies of the rebel earls and their allies.
War did not break out immediately. Edward was in no hurry, for the longer he waited, the stronger he became. The earls too were reluctant to declare war on the king, an act for which they would undoubtedly lose their lives if defeated. While the earls demanded that they be pardoned for the death of Gaveston, on account of his illegal return from exile, the king made agreements and alliances with others. In November his position was greatly strengthened by the birth of a son and heir, Edward. This removed Thomas of Lancaster even further from the succession, and provoked an outbreak of patriotism in the country. The best that the earls could do was to negotiate, and hope that the king’s resolve would weaken.
Roger played no part in the negotiations which began in September 1312. Indeed it is difficult to determine what exactly he was doing at this period. The only piece of evidence so far to have come to light is a reference to a payment to Roger of £100 ordered on 2 April 1313 at Westminster, ‘for his expenses in Gascony’.4 There are a number of possible explanations for this. One is his undertaking some personal service for the king. He could have been returning something or someone of Gaveston’s household to Gascony. However, Gascony at this time suddenly flared up in a conflict between Amanieu d’Albret and the English seneschal, John de Ferrers, and it is more likely that Roger was sent to deal with this. De Ferrers had abused his position in 1312 to attack d’Albret with an army of four thousand men. D’Albret had appealed to King Philip, and the king had judged in his favour, sentencing King Edward to pay a large sum in compensation. De Ferrers died, possibly as a result of poison, in September 1312. A third possibility is that Roger acted on behalf of his kinsman, the Earl of Pembroke, in some business connected with the Count of Foix in Gascony, which the king had asked Pembroke to attend to in January 1313.5 In considering these three possibilities, it is worth bearing in mind that Amanieu d’Albret was a relative of Roger’s wife, Joan, and the man appointed to replace de Ferrers as Seneschal of Gascony, Amaury de Craon, was also a relative of Joan.6 Whatever the reason, it is clear that Roger was wholly loyal at this time, and actively so, being trusted with overseas royal business.
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If there was one single measure of how the government of the country weakened during the first six years of Edward’s reign, it was his policy failure in Scotland. No doubt he associated war in Scotland with his father, the ‘Hammer of the Scots’, and there was probably a personal element in his reluctance to continue his father’s campaigns there. But each year Robert Bruce had made incursions into English territory, and Edward had done little to stop him. Bruce, who had learnt his hard craft of resistance against Edward I, one of the most formidable practitioners of the art of war, now showed how well he had learnt from his years of opposition. He did not have the numbers to defeat the English in open battle, so he and his men harried them, and terrorised the garrisons, and laid waste all they could in the hope that Edward would decide Scotland was simply too great a problem and withdraw. Such a strategy was unchivalrous, perhaps, but effective. And its effectiveness was increased by Edward’s reluctance to launch a Scottish campaign. Indeed, during Gaveston’s lifetime, he only organised Scottish campaigns in order to deflect attention from his political problems in England.
Bruce knew that the key to controlling Scotland was to control the castles. The Scottish forces could ransack manors held by men loyal to the English king, but, unless they held the castles, theirs would only be a temporary grip on the land. Thus, one by one, Bruce attacked the English garrisons. Castle after castle fell to the Scottish grappling irons. Had this happened in Edward I’s time, efforts would have been made to retake them, but in his son’s reign fallen castles were not recaptured. Edward II saw the taking of a castle as a symbolic act, largely undertaken to improve his political position in England. He understood little of the strategy necessary to maintain control of an unquiet country, and cared for it even less.
By 1312 more than the symbolic recapturing of a few castles was required. Robert Bruce and his brother Edward had systematically attacked English fortifications with a will and an audacity which had won them the love as well as the loyalty of their fellow men. After Dundee fell in spring 1312, Perth was the only fortress left in English hands north of the Forth. In the summer of that year Edward Bruce attacked the minor strongholds of Forfar, Dalswinton and Caerlaverock, with some success. In the winter Robert Bruce himself commanded an extremely audacious attack on Berwick, the castle nearest to England. He was thwarted, but his method of attack was new, effective and ingeniously simple. Rather than attach ropes to grappling irons to scale the castle walls, the Scots attached rope ladders. These had the advantage over wooden ladders in that they could be carried by one man for long distances on horseback, and were better than mere ropes for they permitted a far swifter ascent, and allowed the assailants to use their weapons more freely. They also allowed far swifter escape: at Berwick Bruce would have surprised the garrison but for a dog which heard the rattle of the grappling irons and barked, so that the garrison awoke and the alarm was raised. On that occasion the Scots fled, leaving their rope ladders dangling from the walls.
While Edward II was ranting against the earls for the murder of Gaveston, Bruce moved straight on to his next attack. From Berwick on the English border he took his men to the most northern point of English control: the great castle at Perth. He laid siege to the castle openly, but during the nights of the siege his men discovered the shallowest point in the town moat. After a few days they withdrew. To the garrison it appeared that the Scots had decided against attacking the castle, and they relaxed their guard. But a week later, on the particularly dark night of 8 January 1313, Bruce returned with his men and their rope ladders. That night Bruce himself slipped into the dark, icy water up to his neck, and waded forward. A few moments later, he pulled himself out of the water and rapidly climbed his ladder. Once inside, with the advantage of surprise, his men quickly overcame resistance.
Had it been Edward II who had captured the castle, he would have spent a week feasting to celebrate his success. Bruce hardly paused for a moment. He knew that the more he could conquer now, the stronger he would be when the next English army came north. After taking Perth, Bruce took his men to Dumfries; within a month he had managed to starve the castle and town into submission. It was probably soon after news of this disaster reached the king at London that men began to urge on him the importance of a Scottish campaign, and Roger secured the release of the de Verdon rebels to that end. But still Edward did not act. And then Robert Bruce sent his brother against Stirling Castle, the most strategically important of them all.
Edward Bruce was a competent soldier, and no fool, but he was not a military genius like his brother. There was little chance of him forcing Stirling Castle into surrender: it was so strongly defended, so well supplied and so shrewdly commanded by Sir Philip de Mowbray that his army might have waited many months outside the walls. But when de Mowbray (a Scotsman loyal to Edward) observed the lack of English determination to relieve him, he suggested the following terms: if the English had not come within three miles of the castle with a relieving army within a year, he would freely hand over the castle to the Scottish king. Edward Bruce accepted.
Robert Bruce was furious when he discovered the terms to which his brother had agreed. The current run of Scottish success was entirely due to the failure of the English to bring a large army into Scotland. Now his brother had ensured that the English would advance within twelve months. Just as it was nearing completion, with only a few castles left to capture, Bruce’s strategy of piecemeal conquest had been undermined by his own brother.
That was how Bruce read the situation in the summer of 1313. But Edward still refused to countenance a Scottish campaign. His mind was totally set upon his personal battle with the rebel earls; considerations of the wider affairs of state did not interest him. He was waiting for the moment when he could force the Earls of Lancaster, Warwick, Hereford and Arundel to kneel before him and ask for his pardon. This finally occurred, after lengthy negotiations, in October 1313. The following month he finally gave orders for preparations for a Scottish campaign. But even then it was with no particular regard for Scotland. Edward was using the Scottish threat as an excuse for raising an army to destroy not just the Scots but the rebel earls as well. Their begging for pardon was not enough. He hoped to lead an army into the north of England to crush Lord Lancaster and take revenge for the death of his beloved Gaveston, whose body still remained embalmed and unburied at a friary in Oxford.
In December 1313 ninety-five English earls and barons, including Roger and his uncle, were summoned to assemble with their retinues at Berwickon-Tweed to relieve Stirling Castle. The date of the muster was to be 10 June, which gave the army a full six months to prepare. It also gave the Scots time to continue their onslaught on the English castles. Not that they had paused while Edward had dithered over the question of war. In September a Scottish carter named William Binnock had been hired to bring in the hay cut for Linlithgow Castle. He carefully chose a time when some of the garrison were out helping with the harvest. With eight armed Scotsmen concealed within his haywain, he drove towards the open gate and stopped it just across the drawbridge. The men leapt out and killed the porter. Binnock’s boy, sitting on top of the cart, uncovered his axe and cut the ropes by which the drawbridge could be raised. As the portcullis came down, the cart was only partly crushed, and it allowed the rest of the Scots waiting nearby to gain entry. After a short fight, the castle was taken. The remainder of the garrison returned from the fields to find their own castle held against them.
On the dark night of Shrove Tuesday 1314 James Douglas and a band of knights, with their armour covered in black surcoats, crept on their hands and knees towards Roxburgh Castle. Using their trusted rope ladders the Scots were soon on the walls. The watchman at the top was silenced. Few of the garrison, celebrating Shrove Tuesday with the overindulgence traditionally expected, lived to regret it on Ash Wednesday. Not to be outdone by this bold manoeuvre, another Scottish knight, Sir Thomas Randolph, led a party to Edinburgh, an even more strongly defended castle, being built high above the town on volcanic rock. There he enlisted the help of William Francis, who had grown up in the castle. As a young man, Francis had been in the habit of visiting a woman in the town, and had learnt how to scale the rock face. On 14 March, another moonless night, the main Scottish force threw themselves at the east gate. As they fought in vain against the great defences of the castle, William Francis and a handful of knights silently crept up the huge rock. At the top they again used their rope ladders and entered the castle, killing the guards they found in the dark corridors within and making their way to the gate to welcome in their compatriots. With the exception of the border fortress of Berwick, the English were left with only three castles in Scotland: Bothwell, Dunbar and Stirling.
English military preparations continued while the Scots seized the fortresses. In March Roger was ordered to find three hundred footsoldiers in his lands in South Wales. Lord Mortimer of Chirk, in his capacity of Justiciar of Wales, was ordered to find three thousand fighting men from the principality. Every port was ordered to provide ships and sailors; every county to provide large numbers of men. Edward was taking no chances; his campaign was going to be the largest and best equipped the island had yet seen. In all 21,640 men were summoned, not including a significant contingent from Ireland, and although not all of these arrived, the vast majority did, and their numbers were supplemented with men from Gascony, Germany, France, Brittany, Poitou and Guienne.7
Gathering the men and forcing the march north was a huge effort. The footmen mustering at Wark and the nobles at Berwick all had to converge on Stirling before 24 June. Huge amounts of food were needed, requiring wagons which, had they all been put in a single row, would, it was said, have stretched for twenty miles.8 On 27 May Lord Mortimer of Chirk was ordered to hasten the arrival of his men from South Wales. Gradually the army drew together. On 17 June the huge force set out from Berwick and Wark along the old Roman road north-west through Lauderdale, towards Edinburgh, which the leaders reached over the course of 19–20 June. At Edinburgh they waited for the rest of the army to gather, and then, on the morning of Saturday 22 June, they pushed on.
It was full midsummer heat. In order to keep on schedule to arrive by Midsummer’s Day the footsoldiers had to cover the twenty miles to Falkirk. Many were tired, having arrived late, and twenty miles had been the distance which many had had to march each day for the past week or more. The sheer numbers contributed to the extra effort; one fit man can easily walk twenty miles but an army of twenty thousand men, lurching forward and then brought to a standstill, carrying armour and weapons, forced to strike camp and then to set up camp again, is another matter. The supplies required to feed that many men, and their carthorses, pack animals and the knights’ destriers (specially bred war horses) added to the logistic problem. Moving all these men, animals, tents, armour and supplies in a coordinated fashion, so that the whole army was equipped and fed, greatly slowed the army. Thus, on the night of the 22nd, as the men settled under their blankets for a short night’s sleep before the last fourteen miles to Stirling, they were very tired indeed. One commentator noted that ‘brief were the halts for sleep, briefer still for food; hence horses, horsemen and infantry were worn out with toil and hunger …’9
On the 23rd the mounted men began to come within sight of Stirling Castle. The Earls of Hereford and Gloucester led the first wave, the vanguard. The road led down a slight slope and then ran through a wood called the New Park. Here Bruce had assembled his army of about eight thousand men. Hidden by the trees, the Scots were in fact amassed in one great ambushing party. Hereford and Gloucester led the way towards the wood ignorant of the dangers.
Riding some way behind the vanguard, the Earl of Pembroke looked at the road ahead and recalled his battle with Bruce seven years earlier, at Loudon Hill. On that occasion the self-proclaimed Scottish king had occupied a road lying across boggy ground, made impassable to mounted knights by earthworks and holes in the road. But although Pembroke was the most experienced leader in his army, Edward did not put him in command. The king was so confident that he regarded the credit for victory as a gift within his power, and placed his nephew, the Earl of Gloucester, in charge of the army. Gloucester was inexperienced in battle. He was a proven tournament champion, it was true, but war was a different matter. The appointment not only disappointed Pembroke, it outraged the Earl of Hereford, the hereditary constable of England, who claimed his hereditary right was being overlooked. As the first footsoldiers trudged into sight of the castle, sweating with their efforts, the huge array of knights before them shifted and seethed like the surf on a beach, uncertain of their next move.
At this point Philip de Mowbray rode out from Stirling under a pass of safe conduct from the Scots. The king had already relieved the siege, de Mowbray announced to Edward and his assembled magnates. The army had come within three miles of Stirling by the appointed day. There was thus no need to engage with Bruce on such difficult ground. And it was very difficult ground, he informed them. Bruce had blocked every narrow path through the woods. The road had been undermined and covered with caltrops (small iron balls with four evenly spaced spikes), to break any charge of knights. To go to the left of the wood was not feasible owing to the raised ground, which only left the English the option of fighting their way through the trees on foot or trying to manoeuvre through the ground to the right, which was low-lying marsh ground, criss-crossed by brooks and rivulets running into the River Forth.
While de Mowbray was speaking to the king’s companions, the knights in the vanguard noticed some Scotsmen running at the entrance to the wood, and pursued them, believing them to be in flight. Hidden by the trees, the Scottish battalion at that end of the wood, commanded by Bruce in person, had not expected the English knights to attack before their foot-soldiers had arrived. As the English knights came riding through the wood, Bruce, who was mounted on a palfrey and armed only with a hand-axe, turned to see Sir Henry de Bohun, nephew of the Earl of Hereford, levelling his lance and charging him down. De Bohun had recognised Bruce from his crown. There was no avoiding a confrontation. The young knight came on, doubtless with visions of his moment of glory. Bruce readied himself, and, at the last moment, swerved out of the way of the lance point and, raising himself up to his full height in the stirrups, brought his axe hard down on the knight’s helmet. The axe blade broke the metal, and cleaved into his skull. As de Bohun fell dead, Bruce’s astonished followers and the equally astonished English found themselves gawping at the broken haft of the axe still in Bruce’s hand.
Suddenly the vanguard and the Scots found themselves face to face, committed to battle. With a cry each side rushed forward and the fighting began. The Earl of Gloucester was pulled from his horse, but supported by his fellow knights he got to his feet and fought himself free of the enemy’s clutches. In the close confinement of the woodland road, the English could not easily turn their back on their enemy and ride to safety, nor could they charge them down. Many men fell before they broke free from the trees, pursued for a short distance by the exultant Scots.
While this fight was taking place, another large contingent of English knights set off to ride around the wood, through the marshland across which the Bannockburn flowed. Their purpose was to see whether the English could surround the wood, and so attack the whole Scottish army on all sides at once. They too were in for a surprise. Groups of men in close-drawn clusters, called schiltroms, bristling with pikes up to sixteen feet long, advanced from the woods towards them, blocking their way. As the heavily armoured knights rode towards these schiltroms, the Scots held their ground. The technique for breaking up such a dense thicket of pikes was to use archers to open up gaps, but the English knights had no archers. Their archers in fact were still dusting themselves off after their march or still traipsing over the hills several miles away. After a frustrating skirmish, in which the Scots undoubtedly came off best, the English withdrew.
Now the lack of English strategic thinking began to show. Men were still arriving, and it was impossible to march on without them, for the Scots would simply emerge from the wood and kill them and take their baggage train. Thus the English could neither move on, nor could they remain where they were, in a weak position. They could neither attack nor easily defend themselves. After much debate, Edward decided to advance a little, across the Bannockburn, and to form up there, ready in case the Scots should attack by night, and not beyond reach of the arriving men and wagons.
It was a catastrophic decision, probably the worst tactical move in English military history. The English footsoldiers, already exhausted, now had to spend the night without sleep as they found ways to cross the streams of the low-lying land around the village of Bannockburn. The village itself, abandoned in the face of the English advance, was pulled to pieces as men took doors and whatever wood they could find to make bridges and paths across the mud. But the army was too big to manoeuvre into such a small area in the darkness. All night men splashed around, hungry, tired and shouting with frustration, completely demoralised.
The principal reason underlying the English decision to camp in such a poor location was an assumption. They did not imagine for a moment that the Scots would attack them, and thus they did not imagine they would have to fight a battle on that very awkward site. They were aware of the possibility of a night attack, but they were sure that next morning they would be safe. Bruce himself was not certain he wanted to attack the English; his security lay in his position in the wood, not in the strength of his army, and his skill lay in his well-planned surprise attacks. Only when, after dark, Sir Alexander Seton and his men crept away from the English force to meet Bruce and tell him that the English were disorganised and demoralised, and that this was his one chance to defeat them in pitched battle, did Bruce put the question to his fellow band of captains. Their answer was unanimous.
In the early hours of Monday 24 June 1314, as first light spread, the English saw the Scottish army proceed out of the wood towards them. Edward Bruce led one battalion of men out, followed by James Douglas leading another, who in turn was followed by Thomas Randolph with another. ‘What?’ exclaimed King Edward as he gazed across the land towards the massed Scottish forces, ‘Do they mean to fight?’ Then as he watched, he saw the Scottish army, to a man, go down on their knees. ‘Look!’ he laughed. ‘They are begging for mercy!’ ‘Yes,’ replied Sir Ingram d’Umphraville, ‘but not from you. They are asking God for forgiveness, for their trespass against Him. For those men will either win or die.’10
D’Umphraville was not the only one who reckoned that the English army was not properly prepared. The Earl of Gloucester also considered that a day’s wait would be to their advantage. Even now, as archers on either side began to loose their arrows off against one another, they did not need to join battle. But the king, who was becoming unnerved by his captains’ hesitancy, accused Lord Gloucester of treachery and deceit. Gloucester, having had to suffer comments on his inexperience as a military leader, had had enough. ‘Today it will be clear that I am neither a traitor nor a deceiver!’ he shouted at the king, and at once he prepared his knights to ride forward. With trumpets blaring, shouts filling the air, and the massed praying of frightened men and the whinnying of terrified horses, the Earl of Gloucester and his five hundred horsemen galloped towards the ranks of James Douglas. Other groups followed him in uncoordinated attacks, until within seconds the situation had slipped from the control of any commander.
The king saw that there was now nothing to do but fight. With the heroic-to-the-point-of-legendary knight Sir Giles d’Argentein on one side and the experienced Earl of Pembroke on the other, his helmet was strapped on, and his weapons handed to him. Although no sources record the whereabouts of either Mortimer at this stage, it is very likely that they were with the king, also readying themselves for the charge.11 But as they waited, on the brink of attacking, they saw a group of Scotsmen rush forward. To their horror, amidst the clanging of weapons on armour and the screams of dying men and horses, the Earl of Gloucester’s great war horse was skewered by a pikeman and, rearing up in panic, unseated the earl in its dying throes. The onlookers willed his men to push forward and save him, but, at the very moment when he could have been saved, the Scots rushed forward with a great cry. His men could only watch astonished as he was hacked to death. The second greatest lord of the kingdom, second only to the Earl of Lancaster, died at the hands of Scottish soldiers in the churned up mud of Bannockburn.
Now the charge began in earnest, the horses galloping forward as Sir Giles d’Argentein led the rush to where the earl had been struck down. Riderless horses which had been wounded on the pikes rushed here and there, creating confusion. Knights’ armoured destriers charged on to the pikes, so that the air was filled with the sounds of pike shafts splintering and cracking as well as the screams of dying horses and men, and the war cries of both sides. At one stage Edward Bruce was struck down, but Thomas Randolph saw the danger in which the king’s brother found himself and launched his men forward, his banner before him, and swept over the place to bring Edward Bruce to safety. The English redoubled their efforts, but Randolph held his ground, and, despite another English onslaught, remained steady.
If Edward had had an opportunity to talk through his strategy with his commanders, they would have counselled him to break up the Scottish lines using his archers. But as the overconfident English had not expected the Scots to attack them in the open, their archers were stationed on the ground furthest from the front. Only now did they come to the fore, to unleash a volley of arrows on the Scotsmen. But their ability to break the Scottish line was limited. Moreover, Bruce had a few hundred horsemen in hand for just such a purpose as this, and he ordered this contingent to charge into the archers. The archers broke ranks and fled, leaving the knights on the field to fight out the hand-to-hand battle unaided, while the Scottish archers rained down arrows on the English.
It was now that the real weakness of the English position became clear. So narrow was the place they had chosen that they blocked themselves from moving forward and encircling the Scots. Men waited at the rear while the knights perished on the Scottish pikes, unable to force their way forward. Thus the English superiority in numbers was rendered meaningless. At one point King Edward’s horse was killed beneath him. Down he went, with a great cry from both sides as the Scots tried to push forward to capture him and the English fought even harder to save him. In the desperate scuffle which followed, the king had his shield struck from his grasp, and looked as if he was lost, but at the critical moment, as the Scots advanced, they were met by Sir Giles d’Argentein, charging furiously to the fore, through the thrusting spears and swinging axes of the Scots infantry, to rescue him.
The shock of their king being unhorsed was catastrophic to the English; the scent of victory to the Scottish was euphoric. Bruce’s men fought like madmen, raining axe blows on the English shields and helmets with all the justification of men whose families had been hanged and whose houses had been burnt. So hideous were the sounds of weapons on armour, the grunts as spears were thrust forward, and the screams, cries, groans and shouts of men in battle that many ran from the place. Those who continued to fight trampled on dead bodies, their shields so covered in blood that their heraldic devices could not be made out, the horses of the dead galloping in blind panic here and there, colliding with men stumbling with exhaustion from the effort, the heat and the lack of sleep.
And then the trumpeters in the English vanguard sounded the retreat.
‘On them! On them! On them! They fail!’ yelled the Scots triumphantly, pushing forward with their pikes against the few knights still mounted. At the shout the Scottish camp attendants, noncombatants, appeared on the ridge where the wood descended to the battlefield. To the English in their panic, it seemed as if a new, fresh Scottish army was approaching. The English footsoldiers completely lost heart. John Barbour, the Scottish clergyman who so carefully chronicled the events in his long poem, The Bruce, drawing from eyewitness accounts, recorded that some of the English stood firm even now, and would not give way. But all was lost, the army out of control, in flight, in panic. In the River Forth, behind them, men were drowning as they tried to escape. Men were being struck down as they tried to cross back across the Bannockburn towards the wagons. Men too heavily armed for flight were trying to strip off their mail in order to run. Already the Scots were killing the boys watching the packhorses and wagons, helping themselves to whatever they found.
The Earl of Pembroke, seeing the king uncertain what to do next, grabbed the reins of Edward’s horse and determined to lead a charge towards the castle to the north. It was the only way out. But Sir Giles d’Argentein shouted to the king as he saw the earl drag him away. ‘Sire, seeing that it is so, farewell! I am not accustomed to fleeing a battle, and I choose here to bide and die rather than shamefully flee!’ And with that the king’s most trusted warrior turned his war horse about, levelled his lance for one last time, and charged into the Scots, crying ‘Argentein! Argentein!’ It was only a matter of minutes before the Scottish spears killed his war horse, and an axe blow gave him the final chivalric immortality he craved.
Now the deepest ties of loyalty came into play, as five hundred mounted knights gathered around their king, with no other purpose than to protect his life like a swarm of bees protecting their queen. None of them had ever been in a situation such as this, and it was behaviour beyond any logical or planned strategy. They rode madly towards the castle, a fast-moving impenetrable wall of steel-clad men, scattering the Scottish foot-soldiers on the periphery of the battle. But not all the mounted knights fled. When he was sure that the king was safe from the pursuing Scots, the Earl of Pembroke and some of his personal knights reined in their horses and turned to stand their ground and hold back the Scots. From what little evidence we have, it seems that Roger Mortimer was among them.12
This rearguard action was the most dangerous part of the whole battle, save the suicidal attacks of the Earl of Gloucester and Sir Giles d’Argentein. Many of Lord Pembroke’s men were killed as they resisted the Scottish onslaught.13 When the time came the men had to fight as they retreated. The earl himself lost his horse and only just managed to escape from the battlefield on foot. Roger was not so lucky. He was surrounded, disarmed and taken captive.
We do not know what happened next, but conjecture is possible. Roger was a third cousin of Robert Bruce, through the same connection as the dead Earl of Gloucester.14 He was also a close ally of the Earl of Ulster, to whose daughter Bruce was married. Thus he was taken to the Scottish king and treated with dignity. He was not ransomed. Instead he was given the duty of taking King Edward’s privy seal and the royal shield, both of which had been found on the battlefield, to the king at Berwick, with the corpses of the Earl of Gloucester and Robert Clifford. To him fell not the penury of ransom, nor the pain of death, but rather the embarrassment of bearing the tokens of the Scottish king’s magnanimity to the English king.15
*
Bannockburn shocked the English in a most profound way. Never could such a defeat have been envisaged. It had destroyed the last vestiges of English rule in Scotland, and had opened up the north of England to Scottish raids. It had also taken the pressure off the Earls of Lancaster and Warwick. They now had the authority to demand changes in the royal household. They claimed the king had openly disregarded the Ordinances in the two years since Gaveston’s death, that he had appointed men to office who did not deserve high honours, and that he had forgiven debts which were not within his power to forgive. It was feared by some that Edward’s flouting of the Ordinances had in particular incurred divine wrath,16 as the Archbishop of Canterbury had threatened with excommunication all those who did not obey their provisions, resulting in the rout of the English army at Bannockburn. Parliament was summoned to address these matters, meeting at York in early September.
The fact that Edward did not suffer greatly in this parliament was due to his loyal supporters, like Pembroke and Roger: men who could not simply be disregarded as royal hangers-on, and who wielded considerable political authority. Roger’s retainers represented Herefordshire and Shropshire as knights, and it seems he was flexing whatever political authority he had at every opportunity. The proceedings of the 1314 parliament confirmed this. The Chancellor and the Treasurer were removed from office, but the men who replaced them were no enemies of the king, and one certainly was a friend of Roger.17 It was the same with the lesser officers. While there had been calls for John de Charlton to be exiled from court, the York parliament confirmed him in his position as Chamberlain of the royal household. William de Melton, another man later chosen by the king along with Roger to reform the royal household, was appointed Keeper of the Wardrobe. Despite the renewed calls from Lancaster for his men to be appointed to office, in almost all respects the York parliament saw courtiers favourable to Roger, his uncle, and the Earl of Pembroke reinstated or promoted. There was one notable exception: the continued presence of Sir Hugh Despenser the younger.
Despenser, who was married to the king’s niece, had been moving into the king’s favour ever since the death of Gaveston. Though the king trusted the advice of men such as the Earl of Pembroke, and, after he had gone down on his knees to beg forgiveness for his part in the Gaveston affair, the Earl of Hereford, he longed for a special companion to help him in his government. In an age when, among the nobles, friendships were defined by blood ties, marriage ties, political alliances and strategic military considerations, Edward wanted a real friend, a personal friend to support him in the way that Gaveston had. Although the right age, Roger was clearly not a candidate, being too much of a warrior, too interested in Ireland, and quite probably too fond of his wife’s embraces. What was becoming clear by 1314, and what the Mortimers truly feared, was that the right man was Hugh Despenser, the man who had sworn to destroy them by way of revenge for the death of his grandfather at the hands of Roger’s grandfather at the Battle of Evesham, fifty years earlier.
Roger remained at court for the remainder of 1314, travelling south in late October and November. In all probability he was with the king when, on 2 January, the corpse of Piers Gaveston was finally buried at Edward’s favourite manor of King’s Langley. The Earls of Pembroke and Hereford were present, as were four bishops, an archbishop, thirteen abbots and more than fifty knights.18 No doubt it was a poignant moment for the king. His two closest boyhood companions, the Earls of Cornwall and Gloucester, were both dead, and he himself had only just turned thirty.
*
Scottish authority had not simply received a boost at Bannockburn, it had received final confirmation of the independence for which Bruce had fought since 1306. In all that time he had learnt never to rest on his laurels. Accordingly King Robert now planned to send his brother Edward to carve out a kingdom in Ireland. The two brothers would both be kings, one either side of the Irish Sea. In confirmation of his brother’s royal blood, Robert settled the inheritance of the throne of Scotland on his brother if he died leaving no male heir.
The Scots managed to keep their plans of invasion very quiet. John de Hothum, who was in Ireland from 5 September to the end of November 1314 on official business, did not hear of anything suspicious. But as soon as a rumour of the invasion reached Westminster, Roger acted. Indeed, his sudden decision to go to Ireland is the first indication we have that the English court had heard of the imminent invasion. On 14 March he appointed attorneys to act on his behalf in Ireland for two years, clearly not anticipating a journey there for some while. On 26 April, however, he changed his mind, and appointed attorneys to act on his behalf in England, and obtained royal letters of protection for himself and Robert FitzElys to go to Ireland. After clearing his remaining business in Westminster, which included making a grant of rents to his brother John Mortimer, a yeoman in the king’s household, a grant of £40 per year for life to his faithful retainer Robert de Harley, and a request for his faithful retainer Hugh de Turpington to be given the constableship of the castle of Kildare, he made his way westward through the rain-sodden country, and took ship in Wales for Dublin.19
How did Roger know about the Scottish invasion so early? This is an interesting question, as clearly the rest of the English court were unaware: even after Bruce had landed, plans were being laid to take Irish troops to fight in Scotland. The explanation must lie in Roger’s intelligence-gathering contacts. We know from later evidence that he used spies, and indeed his accounts for Ireland as governor record that he himself sent clergymen and others to England with secret information for the king which he did not want committed to parchment.20 More specifically, in 1317 Roger accused two of his own vassals of inviting Bruce to Ireland in the first place. We know that Robert Bruce was initially very wary about letting his brother attack Ireland, but if Roger’s accusation was true, it may explain why Roger changed his plans and obtained protection to go to Ireland a full month before the invasion took place. It is possible that a spy in Ireland let him know that such a message had been sent. However, this would beg the question why he allowed men whom he suspected to be traitors to continue to act within his army. It is more likely that Roger heard word from a contact among the native Irish that the Scots were planning to attack, as Bruce wrote to them in advance, asking for their support. It wasthus with only the scantiest information that Roger set off to Ireland.
Edward Bruce landed at Olderfleet, now Larne, in County Antrim, on 26 May 1315. The English lords of the country seem to have been less well-informed than Roger, and were taken wholly by surprise. The native Irish were not much better prepared, despite being sounded out by Bruce in advance. But the change in the weather played into Edward Bruce’s hands. Arriving while the torrential rains of 1315 were threatening to wipe out the harvest, he was able to convince the native lords to adopt a radical solution to their plight. He carried with him copies of a letter from his brother Robert, addressed ‘to all the kings of Ireland, to the prelates and clergy, and to the inhabitants of all Ireland, his friends’:
… [since] our people and your people, free since ancient times, share the same national ancestry and are urged to come together more eagerly and joyfully in friendship by a common language and by common custom, we have sent over to you our beloved kinsmen, the bearers of this letter, to negotiate with you in our name about permanently strengthening and maintaining inviolate the special friendship between us and you, so that with God’s will our nation may be able to recover her ancient liberty.21
Robert Bruce hoped the Irish would help his brother win a kingdom but this was not his sole aim, or even his primary one. His real intention was to spread the frontier on which the English had to defend themselves, thus lessening the chances of Edward sending an army to seek revenge for Bannockburn. The native Irish for their part saw the Scots offering themselves as military assistants in their struggles, precisely at a time when many clans were having difficulty finding enough to eat, and several of them gladly gave Edward Bruce their support.
Edward Bruce had come with no mean force of men. With him were the renowned Sir Thomas Randolph, conqueror of Edinburgh Castle, Sir John de Soulis, Sir John de Stewart, Sir Fergus d’Ardrossan and the shrewd Sir Philip de Mowbray, constable of Stirling, now a fully fledged Scottish patriot. They were joined by Donnell O’Neill, king of Tir Eoghain, and lords O’Cahan, O’Hanlon, MacGilmurry, MacCartan and O’Hagan. The Earl of Ulster was at this time in Connacht, too far away to organise any resistance, and those Ulster lords who decided against immediately joining the Scots made little or no immediate attempt to resist them. A few Irish lords, unhappy with O’Neill’s confederacy, and suspecting that the Scots would impose taxation and tribute of their own, decided to resist. They gathered at the Moyry pass, but were crushed by the Scots army as Edward Bruce and his fellow lords set about their first object: the subjugation of the land nearest Scotland.
On 29 June 1315 Edward Bruce came to Dundalk. Until now he had wooed and coerced the local Irish into helping him, and had divided them amongst themselves so that he could more easily defeat them in battle. As he and his advisers knew well, the only way the Scots would conquer Ireland completely would be if they gained the support of the Irish lords. But now at Dundalk he employed another tactic: terror. The Anglo-Irish gathered in the town had slept poorly the night before the battle, with Bruce encamped at their gates. The following morning, scouts were sent out to assess the size of Bruce’s army. ‘They are nothing; they’re half-a-dinner,’ they reported, and the townsfolk armed and sent forth their men. The battle, however, was hard, and victory was in doubt until the Scots forced the men of Dundalk back into the town. The Irish lords fighting alongside them fled, leaving the Dundalk men to be slaughtered. The mud of the streets turned red with blood. The Scots started looting and killing indiscriminately. They found large stores of wine, and the soldiers went on a continuous drunken rampage, and their lords let them, until the town was destroyed and most of its men and a great number of its women and children had been hacked to death. It was a message to all other undecided Irishmen: turn to Bruce, or the fate which befell the people of Dundalk will also befall you.
Roger was probably at Trim when news of the massacre at Dundalk reached him. It did not spur him to join the army the Justiciar had raised, which met at Greencastle. Nor does it seem that he joined the separate army of the Earl of Ulster, who had summoned the men of Connacht and the vassals of the powerful Irish lord, Felim O’Connor. This is possibly due to a parliament which may have been held at Kilkenny in early July.22 Either way, it seems that it was agreed that Roger’s forces would act as a rearguard, ready to supply reinforcements if necessary. The earl’s army marched through the north of Meath to Athlone, and then north, meeting up with the Justiciar’s army just south of Ardee on 22 July. After a few skirmishes, in which they forced Bruce to withdraw, it was agreed that the earl would proceed alone against the Scots. The Justiciar’s army returned south, as food supplies were short, and apparently a second army was no longer needed. The earl marched north to Coleraine, but Edward Bruce retreated across the deep and fast-flowing River Bann, and destroyed the bridge over it, making a full confrontation between the two armies impossible. Minor skirmishing continued, and the two sides left the country either side of the river devastated. ‘Both armies left neither wood nor plain, nor field nor corn crop, nor residence, nor barn, nor church, without burning and wholly destroying’, as one chronicler put it.23 Together with the rain, the devastation was terrible. All that was not sodden or rotten already was burnt.
Edward Bruce was not a great strategist, but he did have men with him who were, and he and his advisers saw a way to break up the army massed against them on the other side of the river. To Felim O’Connor Edward Bruce secretly offered the lordship of all Connacht if he would desert the earl. To Felim’s rival, Rory O’Connor, who came to him separately, he promised assistance in his own war over Connacht, as long as he protected Felim’s land. Rory, an old rival of Felim’s, then returned to Connacht and ransacked and burnt all the principal towns in the region, including Felim’s estates. Felim left the earl to return to Connacht to defend his territory, was defeated by Rory, and forced to accept his overlordship. Without having to fight at all Edward Bruce had destroyed most of Connacht, killed hundreds of its men, and had drastically reduced the army at the disposal of the Earl of Ulster on the other side of the Bann.
At this point questions were being raised in England about the loyalty of the Irish. On 10 July Edward had written to all the Irish lords, including Roger and a number of the Mortimer tenants in Ireland, asking for a confirmation of their loyalty to the English Crown. This was probably discussed in common among the lords in the Justiciar’s army, for many of the extant answers, all of which protest loyalty, are couched in similar language.24 Also it is noticeable that none of the replies is from Roger’s knights, and Roger himself sent no reply to the king. This may well signify that he personally took responsibility for the loyalty of his men, showing a great confidence in them.
On 1 September Parliament met at Lincoln and decided to send John de Hothum to Ireland, to keep the king informed about events there. But before he even set out things turned disastrously for the worse. On 10 September the Earl of Ulster and Edward Bruce met in battle at Connor. It seems that, as at Bannockburn, the earl had not expected to be attacked, and that in fact he was retreating to join Felim O’Connor; but the Scots gave chase to the earl’s army, and forced the battle. For the earl it was a disaster. His cousin, William de Burgh, was captured, as were several other lords and heirs, and his army fled to Carrickfergus Castle, where the pursuing Scots immediately set about besieging them. The earl himself slipped away from the battle, joining Felim O’Connor in Connacht, while the remaining English accused him of betrayal behind his back. He was, after all, father-in-law to Robert Bruce. He had not only lost his position as a leader of men, he was suspected of treason.
Roger, along with the other nobles in Ireland, was summoned to a parliament to meet at Dublin at the end of October. Its purpose was for John de Hothum to coordinate resistance. But the Scottish naval captain, Thomas Dun, maintaining his sway on the high seas, prevented de Hothum setting sail in time, and he did not arrive until 5 November. By then Roger and his fellow lords had left Dublin and abandoned the parliament. There was no time to discuss strategy: almost every town in Connacht was ablaze and under destruction from warring Irish tribes and Scottish plunderers. It was only a matter of time before the destruction came over the border to Meath.
It is not entirely clear what happened over the next month. No chronicler followed Roger as he organised his men on the north border of Meath. The most detailed account of the Scottish campaign, written by a Scottish clergyman back in Scotland several decades later, probably confuses parts of the forthcoming onslaught with the earlier Battle of Connor, at which the Earl of Ulster was defeated. What we do know for certain is that on or about 13 November Thomas Randolph returned from a short visit to Scotland with five hundred fresh, experienced soldiers, and that he and Edward Bruce then began to march south from Carrickfergus, leaving a besieging party there. Cautious about advancing straight into Roger’s territory of Meath, they left a reserve contingent at Nobber, about ten miles north-east of Kells. On 30 November they crossed the River Dee and headed for the River Blackwater.
A week later the two armies met at the town of Kells. Roger had stocked the castle, removed the cattle from the outlying districts, and had placed the gates and walls of the town in a readily defensible state. This was not a preparation for a siege, but to sustain him in the field, for it appears that it was Roger’s choice to fight here, on the north border of Meath, to try to keep the Scots away from his own lands. Details are very scanty, but it seems that, in order to bring the Scots to where he wanted them, he sent two of his vassals, Hugh and Walter de Lacy, to lure Bruce towards Kells.25Their bait may have been the loyalty of Lord O’Dempsey, an Irish king from Offaly, who had supposedly decided to swear fealty to the Bruce.26 As both sides knew, such promises were Bruce’s only hope of subjugating Ireland. And so he came.
Given that Edward Bruce had left reinforcements at Nobber, on the main road south to Navan, he may have originally planned to bypass Kells altogether. But in the event he came straight to Roger’s army. The outcome was a catastrophe. The Scots began to burn the town. The one chronicler to describe the battle (the annalist of St Mary’s Abbey, Dublin) attributes the defeat to treachery on the part of Hugh and Walter de Lacy, who had deserted Roger ‘at the third hour’. This could mean at the third hour of the battle, or the third hour of the day, i.e. about 9 a.m. It is possible they feigned withdrawal from the battlefield, for the chronicler states they ‘turned their shields’, perhaps implying that they trapped Roger’s army between them and the Scots.27 But this is unlikely, given that several of Roger’s leading vassals later acquitted the de Lacy brothers of directly dealing with the Scots, and these vassals would have been unlikely to support them if they had turned against them on the battlefield.28 A more likely suggestion is that the de Lacys simply fled after three hours of battle, leaving Roger to fight on against a greater force.29 Whatever the cause, Roger was soon in a desperate situation. The chronicler goes on to add that ‘Roger alone with a few others’ survived the battle. It is likely that he withdrew into the town, which was burnt around him, and that he was forced to fight his way out through the Scots, who, to judge from their past strategies, would have held the town gates. For a handful of experienced fighting knights in full armour and on horseback, such a bold manoeuvre was dangerous but well within their capabilities. The end result was that Roger broke free from the carnage at Kells with a handful of knights, and rode towards Dublin. But his army was utterly destroyed, Kells was burnt, and Meath was now, like all Ireland, open to the Scots invaders.
In Dublin Roger met John de Hothum. It was decided that Roger should return to England to report on the recent calamities. The country was all but lost. Only a few castles remained in English hands. English government in Ireland was in tatters. At Christmas 1315, Robert and Edward Bruce could fairly say that they had wrested overlordship of more than one third of the British Isles from the King of England within two years. But while English rule had been obliterated in Scotland, Ireland was not yet wholly defeated; and there were many, like Roger Mortimer, who were determined that the fight should go on.